bandwidth

bitmessage's management of data bandwidth is atrocious
it exchanges with all connected nodes constantly and non stop stream of data to fill up whatever max bandwidth is chosen - if I set max bandwidth to 2048, bitmessage would transfer 100 gigabytes + per day. this is crazy and needs to be fixed.

It appears you already deleted your brain cells.
Bitmessage consumes too much bandwidth even for a flood protocol. The software will consume max bandwidth at full throttle non-stop. Something is happening under the hood that should not be happening.

Maybe we could offload the download of messages by using bittorrent.
I mean, the contents of messages.dat is not sensitive, so theoretically
everyone could download the exact same messages.dat once per day and only
use their bandwidth for uploading.

> Are you joking? messages.dat contains all your > unencrypted messages.
You could operate two separate instances of BM, one as external gateway for
picking up and relaying trafick, and another for writing messages.
The first instance of running locally would that on which you write your
private stuff, and the messages.dat would obviously have to be kept
confidential, but the gateway instance would only relay messages externally,
and that messages.dat would not contain any private unencrypted messages.
Am I correct in assuming that the external gateway instance of BM could
share its messages.dat without any compromise to privacy?